chooky
3d ago
Surely you are not suggesting a run-of-the-mill president or "uniparty interventionist stooge" would have had Middle Eastern adventures on the scale of Trump?
Iran happening and going how it has gone was not in my worst-case Trump scenario either so I don't blame you for rolling those dice, but you very much lost a lot more money than you would have lost betting on a "uniparty" candidate.
chooky
5d ago
I stopped doing core at all once I started doing compounds above body weight. I think the compound itself does all the core you need.
At 1.8x deadlift, stuff like planks is just way too easy for your core now. You will need to do hanging leg raises or something.
chooky
8d ago
I think it is fairly obvious is the amount of people who received access to abortion per dollar. For a pro abortion activist, it is simply this access that is the good.
chooky
9d ago
But your examples are essentially taxpayers as the defraudee, if that is indeed occurring. It is a different beast when private donors feel defrauded, and the ROI on plane tickets for abortions is horrible.
chooky
9d ago
The dollar per case amounts here are really high here, which costs a lot of money and creates a lot of opportunity for fraud (i.e., free trip on the pretext of an abortion, or just cash in the plane tickets). Preventing this fraud would create a lot of work and create a degree of formality that would make it much easier to be sued/prosecuted.
Mailing the pills is a perfect solution.
chooky
16d ago
Don't several characters turn off their hormone implants or get them removed? It all seems very optional.
chooky
19d ago
The loss of cheap loans is also a very large part of current affordability issues.
chooky
19d ago
Nah, the goal is to salvage the best exit ramp possible. What I think this probably looks like is something like the return of JCPOA and Iran retaining control of the strait, which, I agree, sucks; hopefully we can do better! While I would like Trump to suffer a humiliating defeat in the abstract, I recognize that such a defeat would generally be tied to bad outcomes and thus very much do not want it to happen in the case of Iran. Far better would be for the SC to issue a ruling that completely smashes the administration's tariff rationale or something; a humiliating legal defeat on that issue would be a good outcome for the US, in my view, so I can root for that one unconditionally.
chooky
20d ago
I don't claim to be on the euphemism treadmill, which is also to say that my inside views of education and special ed are secondhand. I figured that "handicapped" was probably offensive too (and would have the same sort of exceasibe broadness problem as "retarded") but I decided that I needed some reasonably concise way to refer people whose brains have not developed in a way that provides full functionality.
chooky
20d ago
A concrete advantage of not using "retarded" at all is that it is a very, very broad word to use when referring to the mentally handicapped, which is also an unproductively broad term when the reality is that "retarded" people will have various forms of Down's, autism, etc. Rather than paint with an extremely broad brush, the current permitted usage of "exceptional" (which also frequently encompasses gifted students or anyone whose parents scams them into special privileges) is so obviously useless that it forces any real discussion to focus on the specifics of how an individual student's exceptionalism/handicap presents.
From an etymological perspective, "retarded" is very similar to "ritartando", which anyone who took a year of band recognizes as basically being Latin for "slow". In almost all cases, it is not accurate to describe a mentally handicapped student's learning as merely slower than other students'. While this is perhaps blunt, it is almost, in a sense, more fair, in that seeing a handicapped student as slow means that they are not fulfilling their potential, which in turn subtly puts more blame on them.
I don't really have a strong argument against the use of "retarded" to describe generally idiocy or to use it as a new slur to replace "gay" ("lame" is not nearly taboo enough to work), but there is a reasonably strong argument to dissociate it from the mentally handicapped. Most of the taboo status of "retarded" generally is probably just the education field's reasonably justified move away from it naturally spreading.
chooky
25d ago
As someone who thinks the war is unwise and that the Trump administration seems incapable of competently executing its policies, the blockade makes sense. When Iran closes the Strait, it still lets it own oil out and thus has a strong financial lifeline. The US needs to prevent in order to create leverage, especially because a peace in which Iran tolls the Strait is clearly a massive loss for the US. Even if one cedes, or believes, as I do, that the war was a bad mistake by Trump, the blockade was the only move left.
chooky
28d ago
I think your explanations are missing a driver of why these trends started happening. (I also think you are underemphasizing the greater difficulty of being opposed to gay marriage when one has gay friends or family, though I am not so ambitious as to attempt to explain why being gay seems more common now than 50 years ago.) Anyway, for Gen X/Milennials, the traditional opposition to gay marriage from Boomers and previous generations was severely undermined by the prevalence of divorce among Boomers; why should younger generations take Boomers' moralizing about marriage seriously? This seems like a perfect issue for rebellion.
chooky
28d ago
I think a problem with the smoking metaphor is that it does seem like sex/pregnancy is closer to Russian roulette. Besides Russian roulette, a matching metaphor could be rock climbing/falling to your death; flying/plane crash; or driving a car and crashing it. While sometimes people have sex with the aim of conceiving, all of these other "bad" outcomes are things that would make people just never do a given activity if they thought it was at all likely to happen in that instance.
chooky
28d ago
Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking.
These seem substantially different in that each time of having sex is an either/or of conceiving or not, but each instance of nicotine consumption only very marginally increases cancer risk. No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times, but they very easily could conceive a child on their first time having sex.
It would reduce the expense by a lot. A huge part of the reason mainline public school performance per dollar looks bad is because of the immense cost of dealing with special ed kids, which private and charter schools get to avoid. Worse, the additional funding schools receive does not really cover the additional cost of special ed kids, so it also sucks resources away from mainstream. Even worse, the ubiquity of special ed has led to the toxic equilibrium of helicopter parents inventing reasons for their perfectly normal kids to receive accomodations (mostly special treatment like extra time on tests).
The contemporary interpretation of special ed law mandating schools do almost whatever it takes to put students in mainline classrooms is a really big problem.
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